Man’s best friend in show
Hats, gloves and vest-tops off to whoever commissioned the apogee of reality cop show; ‘send in the dogs’. As with previous shows featuring the long arm of the law (spraying a crim with pepper spray while simultaneously tasering his ass one hopes), the title says it all. Tune into ‘Cops’ and you know it’s not going to be another freaking cookery programme. ‘Chopper coppers’ had cops and ‘copters. ‘Worlds wackiest police chases’ had hey-ho so-so footage of rednecks being chased, but was redeemed by the occasional fatal shooting at the end. ‘Send in the dogs’ is about coppers with mutts (not WPCs).
It’s sensational! If your idea of entertainment is an hour of footage of some scumbag criminal trying to back up against a brick wall so hard his buttocks are in danger of actually burrowing into it, while a barely-restrained German Shepard snarls and snaps at him inches from his throat, then this is the show for you. I watch it with the sound down and the Rolling Stones playing loud!
Now and again they show the cuddlier side of things, with spaniels brought into houses full of chavscum. The scene goes something like this:
Police: are there any drugs in the house?
Chav mum, surrounded by rainbow chav brood, smoking: Naw!
Dog: Woof! (Searches house in seven seconds, wags tail at kids cuddly toy.)
Police: There’s a half kilo of heroin in this teddy bear. Care to explain?
Suffice to say, there’s a reason that these criminal geniuses reside in dilapidated council flats and not in secret underwater volcano lairs complete with henchmen and monorails. Likewise when they do a search at a tube station and the dog goes wild when some random bloke walks through the turnstile.
Police: Any drugs on you?
Bloke: No.
Police turns out blokes pockets. Drugs are found.
Bloke: Oh, yea.
Which begs the question does smoking pot make you criminally stupid, or are pot smokers dumb to begin with and just toke a little to quell the feelings of inadequacy – for instance being outsmarted by a dog.
And while some dogs are smart, most are, lets face it, just about what you’d expect from an animal. The other morning I saw a sausage dog on the train platform, waddling along with its owner on a leash. It gave me one of those little surges of joy that you experience when you see such things, like seeing a flower pushing through concrete. It’s the opposite of that feeling of useless sorrow that one feels every time one turns on the news.
This sausage dog was wagging its tail so hard it was in danger of doing damage to its spine – what makes a dog so happy? Perhaps it’s just the positive attitude of an animal living its life at ankle level has to have to survive – maybe there’s things to be experienced at street level that we have no ken of, and certainly dogs are well equipped to experience it, being in my experience strangers to disgust. ‘Hey, what’s that, it’s, yes, I believe it’s a fresh turd – I wonder if it tastes any good, hummmn, munch munch. No, that’s quite disgusting – better sick it up. Retchhhhhhhhh! Ah, that’s better. You know, it tasted just like the last hundred turds I ate, disgusting, but you never know…hey, there’s another one, now this one might taste lovely. Let’s see.’ You have to admire that kind of enthusiasm, seen only in the animal kingdom and the singles scene.
Of course some people rely on animal intelligence. The other week I saw a guy with his guide dog – nothing unusual there, except he was telling it off by swearing at it. Telling your adorable looking labrador that he’s ‘being a fucking pain’ is a pretty bold move, especially in a train station, where his next conversation with his dog might go something like ‘okay boy, are you sure this is platform 4, because it feels awful funny underfoot, almost like a rail, and if I didn’t know better I’d say that sounds exactly like a goods train locking breaks at 90mph and heading right towards me. Boy? Boy?’
It’s sensational! If your idea of entertainment is an hour of footage of some scumbag criminal trying to back up against a brick wall so hard his buttocks are in danger of actually burrowing into it, while a barely-restrained German Shepard snarls and snaps at him inches from his throat, then this is the show for you. I watch it with the sound down and the Rolling Stones playing loud!
Now and again they show the cuddlier side of things, with spaniels brought into houses full of chavscum. The scene goes something like this:
Police: are there any drugs in the house?
Chav mum, surrounded by rainbow chav brood, smoking: Naw!
Dog: Woof! (Searches house in seven seconds, wags tail at kids cuddly toy.)
Police: There’s a half kilo of heroin in this teddy bear. Care to explain?
Suffice to say, there’s a reason that these criminal geniuses reside in dilapidated council flats and not in secret underwater volcano lairs complete with henchmen and monorails. Likewise when they do a search at a tube station and the dog goes wild when some random bloke walks through the turnstile.
Police: Any drugs on you?
Bloke: No.
Police turns out blokes pockets. Drugs are found.
Bloke: Oh, yea.
Which begs the question does smoking pot make you criminally stupid, or are pot smokers dumb to begin with and just toke a little to quell the feelings of inadequacy – for instance being outsmarted by a dog.
And while some dogs are smart, most are, lets face it, just about what you’d expect from an animal. The other morning I saw a sausage dog on the train platform, waddling along with its owner on a leash. It gave me one of those little surges of joy that you experience when you see such things, like seeing a flower pushing through concrete. It’s the opposite of that feeling of useless sorrow that one feels every time one turns on the news.
This sausage dog was wagging its tail so hard it was in danger of doing damage to its spine – what makes a dog so happy? Perhaps it’s just the positive attitude of an animal living its life at ankle level has to have to survive – maybe there’s things to be experienced at street level that we have no ken of, and certainly dogs are well equipped to experience it, being in my experience strangers to disgust. ‘Hey, what’s that, it’s, yes, I believe it’s a fresh turd – I wonder if it tastes any good, hummmn, munch munch. No, that’s quite disgusting – better sick it up. Retchhhhhhhhh! Ah, that’s better. You know, it tasted just like the last hundred turds I ate, disgusting, but you never know…hey, there’s another one, now this one might taste lovely. Let’s see.’ You have to admire that kind of enthusiasm, seen only in the animal kingdom and the singles scene.
Of course some people rely on animal intelligence. The other week I saw a guy with his guide dog – nothing unusual there, except he was telling it off by swearing at it. Telling your adorable looking labrador that he’s ‘being a fucking pain’ is a pretty bold move, especially in a train station, where his next conversation with his dog might go something like ‘okay boy, are you sure this is platform 4, because it feels awful funny underfoot, almost like a rail, and if I didn’t know better I’d say that sounds exactly like a goods train locking breaks at 90mph and heading right towards me. Boy? Boy?’
Labels: Dogs, Reality television
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home